“There was a name. I’d have to look through my notes.”
She glances across the hardwood floors of her apartment, past the ratty futon, where there’s a narrow, built-in bookshelf near the front door, and, below it, a sagging cardboard box, which she carried out of the Post’s offices eighteen months ago, loading it into her VW Golf before heading home, lugging it into her apartment and dropping it by the door, where it’s sat every day since, a dusty reminder that she was once a writer, a real one. She has often prided herself on being less openly sentimental than her colleagues. That April morning last year, when news came that the paper’s owner was pulling the plug, Lonnie had not hung around for the postmortem. While her coworkers stood dumbfounded, so blindsided that they had still been working on stories when their desk phones started ringing, Lonnie grabbed every piece of paper she’d ever scribbled on, combing the corners of her cubicle for anything she might have missed. Short of swiping the desktop Mac she wrote on, she got everything. By the time security started ushering folks out of the building, Lonnie was already a mile up the Southwest Freeway. She would cry later, she told herself. Only, the thing is, she never did. No tears, just beer and cigarettes for breakfast, whole days watching Sally Jessy and Montel. The box was meant as a kind of insurance policy, a way to start over when the time was right. There are at least a hundred stories inside, pieces she’d researched, bits of knowledge trying to find their way to the light of day. She’s pitched a few, tried to sell herself to the Statesman in Austin, the Morning News in Dallas, the Star-Telegram, Texas Monthly, even Texas Highways. But no one local is hiring, and the Chronicle won’t have her back–a feeling that’s mutual. “I can take a look,” she says. “I had started a bit on the second girl last year. The same name came up, I remember. Almost from the beginning, HPD was looking at similarities between the two cases.”
“Maybe you and this Bartolomo guy could compare notes.”
“Ha.”
In the old days it would have been unthinkable, reporters from rival papers sharing information. The whole system was set up for one to keep a competitive distance from the other; however they duked it out on the front pages, chasing scoops and stories, there was an understanding that they made each other better. But Houston is a one-paper town now, the first major city in the country to try to run a democracy with a single journalistic checkpoint, a single voice guiding four million people through a maze of complex issues.
“They organized a search, Arlee and the Wainwrights,” Jay says. “They’re block-walking to gather any other information on who might have seen what. If this is what they think it is, then there’s not a lot of time.”
“No, there isn’t. I’ll give Bartolomo a call, see where they’re at with this. Mike Resner, the detective on the first cases, I think he’s still over in the Northeast Division. Might be worth a call there too.”
“It might put folks at ease out there, if they had a better sense of what’s going on with the investigation,” Jay says. “I think there’s a hope that finding this girl might lead to answers about the other two, offer some peace for the families. Between the fires and this, Pleasantville could use some good news.”
“Hey,” Lon says softly. “I’m glad you called.”
“Me too,” he says, hanging up.
When he looks up, Eddie Mae is standing over his desk. She must have come in sometime while he was on the phone. She’s still wearing her overcoat, and she’s holding a stack of pink message slips in one hand and a Jack in the Box cup in the other. The bank called, she says right off, some problem with the line of credit for the Pleasantville case, and the Arkansas folks are at it again. The Pritchetts, plaintiffs ten through seventeen in the class action suit Jay filed against Chemlyne Industries in Little Rock, Jay’s last time in a courtroom, have been at each other’s throats since they took a deal–two days before Jay’s closing arguments, and against his strident counsel. The ones with any money left are constantly fighting with the ones who have long since gone back to being broke, albeit with shiny cars in their driveways and pounds of tenderloin in the deep freeze. “B. J. Pritchett wants to sue his brother Carl for defamation,” Eddie Mae says. “Something about a collection of Nancy Wilson records B. J. said he would buy off Carl and never did, and Carl going around town calling his brother a cheap son of a bitch. B.J. wants you to handle the matter in court. He’s got a five-hundred-dollar check already made out to you as a retainer.” She rolls her eyes.
Jay sighs. He curses the day he ever set foot in Arkansas.
Looking down at the desktop, where the newspaper is still open to the story of the missing girl, Eddie Mae cocks her head, staring, slantways, at the black-and-white photo of Alicia Nowell. “What’s it been now?” she says.
“Three days.”
“I’ll pray for her.”
“Was there something else?” Jay says, folding the newspaper in half.
“That lady from the trailer park called again, the one out to Baytown. She and her neighbors, they’re still having problems with their water. She’s convinced something’s leaking out of the oil refinery down there, some runoff that’s tainting everything. It’s got so she won’t even cook with it no more.”
“Give her the list of referrals.”
“You won’t even meet with her?”
“Not taking clients, Eddie Mae, you know that.”
She presses her lips together, quietly weighing whether this is the time to get into it with him. The one time she brought up losing a girlfriend to cancer, he’d quickly shut her down, not wanting to hear other people’s ideas of what they thought he was living through, or to turn grief into a contest, one he would always win. He could never bring himself to shame someone’s good intentions.